A captivating selection of family snapshots from his mother's photo albums, Michael Snow’s latest artist’s book illuminates patterns in the passage of time. Over the past half-century, Toronto-based artist Michael Snow has explored perception, consciousness, language, and temporality. This theme is particularly relevant to his latest work, dedicated to his adventurous mother, Marie-Antoinette Françoise Carmen Levesque Snow Roig, whose family photographs provide a narrative throughline. Snow consolidates his mother’s albums, presenting 1,500 images. In a tender foreword, he expresses his desire to share the “[The photographs] are so beautiful and so historic.” While he has previously integrated samples from these albums into his work, this volume offers a larger, unified selection. The compiled images tell a more complete biographical story, which Snow leaves intact on the surface. He adds his interpretation by drawing out patterns within the collection and his mother’s writing. Snow creates an album that is distinctly his own, embracing what art historian Martha Langford describes as a “deep understanding and surrender to form.”
